Tutorial Assignments (Session 2006-2007)

Tutorial Assignments
1 Read the following poem and answer the questions below the text:

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Duns Scotus’s Oxford

Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poised powers;

Thou hast a base and brackish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping ─ folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of reality the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.

Questions:

1. What are the appropriate meanings of the following: towery, branchy, bell-swarmèd, rook-racked, coped, brackish, confounded, reality, spot?
2. What is peculiar about the morphological character of its diction ? Which of your senses is engaged most? Why?
3. What is the syntactic explanation of once encounter in (l.4), sours/ That neighbour-nature (ll.5-6), thou hast confounded/ Rural rural keeping (ll.7-8), be rival Italy or Greece (l.13), who fired France (l.14)?
4. Who is he in line 10?
5. Which elements in the poem require you to go outside the text for interpretation? Why?
6. What is unusual about the literary form employed in the poem? How do the vocabulary and syntax support its formal departures?

________


2. Write a critical appreciation of the above poem using the techniques of practical criticism. (First show the anatomical findings in the margin of the text and then write an essay.

3. Why could one call Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation history rather than literature? Give adequate justification for your position.

4. Discuss the Latinate syntax of Milton’s English in the Books of Paradise Lost you have read.


Submit all your assignments to the office of the Department. Deadline for submission: September 20, 2008. No submission is acceptable after that date.